The Wanderer (8 page)

Doc raised a hand. "It's rotating toward the east," he asserted. "That is, this side of it is—which means that it is rotating
retrograde
to Earth and most of the other planets of our solar system."

"My God, Bill, now we get astronomy lessons," the woman in pale gray carped in a low, sardonic voice to the man beside her.

The thin woman's portable radio came on, quite weakly except for the static. The music, what there was of it, had a galloping, surging rhythm. After a moment Paul recognized Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries," sounding, out here in the great open, as if it were being played by an orchestra of mice.

Don Merriam was almost halfway back to the Hut, his boots kicking up dust as he hurried with care across the lightening plain, when Johannsen's voice sounded crisply by his ear. He stopped.

Johannsen said: "Get this, Don. You are not to re-enter the Hut. You are to board Ship One and prepare for solo take-off."

Don suppressed the impulse to say: "But Yo—"

The other chuckled approvingly at his silence and continued: "I know we've never flown them solo except in practice on the mock-up, but this is orders from the top.

Dufresne's suited up. He'll join you in Ship Two. I'll be in Baba Yaga Three to relay back to Gompert at base, who'll relay to HQ Earth. On order you and Dufresne will take off.

You will reconnoiter the northern half, and he, the southern, of the object behind Luna that's making the yellow and purple light. It's hard to believe, but HQ Earth says it's a—"

The voice was lost in a ponderous, almost subsonic, grinding roar coming through Don's boots and up his legs. The moon moved sideways a foot or more under Don's feet, throwing him down. In the two seconds he was falling his only active thought was to lift his arms bent-elbowed to make a cage around his helmet, but he could see the gray dust rippling and lifting a little here and there like a thick rug with wind under it, as inertia held it back while the solid moon moved beneath it.

He crashed hollowly on his back. The roaring multiplied, coming in everywhere through the underside of his suit. Gouts of dust skimmed off around him in low parabolas. His helmet hadn't cracked.

The roaring faded. He said: "Yo!" and "Yo!" again, and then with his tongue he triggered the Hut whistle.

The purple-and-yellow highlight glared down at him from the western edge of the Atlantic, touching Florida.

There was no answer from the Hut.

Paul and Margo started out after the main body of saucer students heading back to the cars. They couldn't recall now who had first said: "We'd better be getting out of here,"

but once the words had been spoken, agreement and reaction had been swift and almost universal. Doc had wanted to stick with his umbrella-and-table-corner astrolabe, and had tried to browbeat a nucleus of informed observers to stay with him, but he finally had been dissuaded.

"Rudy's a bachelor," Hunter explained to Margo as a few of them waited for Doc to gather his things. "He's willing to stay up all night making observations or chess moves,
or trying to make burlesque babes
—" he shouted the last back toward Doc—"but the rest of us have got families."

As soon as the idea of leaving had been proposed, Paul had been in a sweat to get to Moon Project headquarters. He and Margo would swing around direct to Vandenberg Two, he decided; in fact, he had been about to suggest to her that they tramp to the beach gate—it might be quicker—when ha remembered that admission clearance would be delayed there.

Then just as they had been setting out, among the first to leave, Miaow, perhaps encouraged by seeing Ragnarok put on leash, had sprung from Margo's arms to investigate the under parts of the dance floor. Ann had stayed to witness the recovery of Miaow, and Rama Joan with her daughter. The last two made a queer sight: the calm-eyed little girl with her pale red braids and the mannish woman in her rumpled evening clothes.

When Doc came bustling along, the six of them set out, stepping briskly along to catch up with the others.

Doc jerked a thumb at the bearded man. "Has this character been daggering my reputation?" he demanded of Margo.

"No, Professor Hunter has been building it up," she told him with a grin. "I gather your name is Rudolf Valentino."

"No, just Rudolf Brecht," Doc chortled, "but the Brechts are a sensuous clan, too, heigh-ho!"

"I see you forgot your umbrella," Hunter told him, instantly clamping a hand on Doc's elbow. "Not that I'm going to let you go back for it."

"No, Ross," Doc told Hunter, "I deliberately left it stuck there—that bumbershoot is already a kind of monument. Incidentally, I want to go on record that we're all being fools. Now we'll be fighting traffic the whole night, whereas we could have employed it in fruitful observation at an ideal location—and I'd have treated you all to a big farm breakfast!"

"I'm not at all sure about that ideal location part," Hunter began somberly, but Doc cut him off by pointing up at the Wanderer as he strode along and demanding: "Hey, granting that thing's a genuine planet, what do you think the yellow and maroon areas are? I'll plump for yellow desert and oceans full of purple algae and kelp."

"Arid flats of sublimated iodine and sulphur," Hunter hazarded wildly.

"With a border patrol of Maxwell's demons to keep them separate, I suppose?" Doc challenged amiably.

Paul looked up. The purple margin-band was wider now and the yellow area, moving toward the center, was almost like a fat crescent.

Ann spoke up, "I think it's oceans of golden water and lands of thick purple forest."

"No, young lady, you got to stick to the rules of the game," Doc admonished, leaning down toward her as he still strode on. "Which is that you can't have anything up there that you don't know about down here."

"Is that your formula for approaching the unknown, Mr. Brecht?" Rama Joan asked with a suggestion of laughter. "Would it even work for Russia?"

"Well, I myself think it's a darn good formula for approaching Russia," Doc replied.

"Hey, young lady," he continued, speaking to Ann, "what's the best way of getting on the good side of your mother? I never wooed a Rama yet and the idea intrigues me."

Ann shrugged, switching her red braids, and Rama Joan answered for her. "Don't begin by expecting to find only reflections of yourself," she said tartly. Suddenly she jerked off her turban, releasing a cloud of red-gold hair which at last made her seem plausible as Ann's mother, though rendering her male evening dress doubly incongruous.

They were catching up with the others now, threading past the sea-grass. Paul was intrigued by the number who were walking with a permanent hunch away from the Wanderer, then realized that he was walking that way, too. They overtook the Ramrod and the two women with him, the thin one of them carrying the radio, which was now playing tinnily the Grieg A minor Concerto, sandwiched between thick static.

"I tried other stations," the woman told Hunter, "but the static was even worse."

Abruptly the music broke off. As one, they stopped, and several of the people ahead of them did, too.

The radio said, quite clearly: "This is a Sigalert Bulletin. The Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways—no, change that—the Hollywood, Santa Monica and Ventura Freeways are closed by congestion. Motorists are requested to use
none
of the freeways until further notice. Please stay home. The appearance in the sky is not an atomic attack.

Repeat:
not
an atomic attack. We've just been talking over the phone with Professor Humason Kirk, noted Tarzana College astronomer, and he tells us that the appearance in the sky is unquestionably—get that, folks, unquestionably—an orbiting cloud of metallic powders reflecting sunlight. He tentatively identifies the powders as gold and roseate bronze. The total weight of the powders can be no more than a few pounds, Professor Kirk assures us, and they can't hurt—"

"Oh, the stupid ass!" Doc broke in. "Powders!
Puffballs!"

Several people shushed him, but by the time they could listen again, there was only the sound of the piano rippling through A minor runs.

Don Merriam figured he had to be within a hundred yards of the Hut when the second big moonquake came, a vertical one this time, but heralded by the same horrible grinding roar, as if Luna were tearing her guts out. His teeth stung and the metal of his suit vibrated fiercely, as if resonating a cosmic piano note.

Solid moon dropped from under his boots, then smashed up against their corrugated soles, then dropped away and smashed again. The dust carpet fell and lifted with him. Here and there bushels of it shot up a dozen feet or more, then fell back, abruptly compared with dust on Earth.

The jolts went on. Don fought to keep his footing as if he were standing on the back of a bucking horse, his hands ready to move to whichever side toward which he should overbalance. The jumping dust made bright vertical scrawls—thick, hairpin brushstrokes—against the starfields. Some solid sunlight was once more bathing Plato's plain.

The jolts subsided. Don upped the polarization of his helmet window to four-fifths max and scanned for the Hut. He'd quit trying to raise them by suit radio. He couldn't make out the portholes, but that was always harder in sunlight. He figured the right direction from the stars and started out.He thought he saw the gleam-edged, long-legged trapezoids of two of the Baba Yagas.

A second horizontal moonquake threw him on his face. He got his forearms raised in time to catch the impact. This ground-parallel temblor was protracted. There were a half dozen sideways surges. Plato's gray dust-lake rippled to the horizon. Dust spray rose and fell. The stuff really did behave more like water (on Earth) than like dust. Rock knobs thrusting up through it made dust wakes. Dust squirts peppered Don's helmet.

A vertical component added itself to the horizontal quake. The roar dazed him.

Don's suit shook like an empty tin can in a paint-mixer.

He gave up waiting and began to crawl toward the ships like a dust-drenched silver beetle. He wished he had a beetle's two extra legs.

The saucer students were sorting themselves out as they headed for their cars, which showed up colorfully at the base of the brown cliffs. The general effect of the Wanderer's light, mixing complementary yellow and violet, was yellowish white, except where mirror surfaces such as water reflected the entire orb, or in the edges of shadows where one color was cut off.

Hunter said to Paul, a shade enviously, "I suppose you Moon Project people already have this thing a lot more thoroughly comprehended than we do. More data, for one thing. Satellite 'scopes, radar, all the rest."

"I'm not so sure of that, Ross," Paul replied. "On the Project you develop a kind of tunnel vision."

The Little Man came back toward them with Ragnarok on short leash and his clipboard in the other hand.

"Remember me?—I'm Clarence Dodd. Mayn't I have your signature now, Miss Gelhorn?" he said winningly, holding out the clipboard to Margo. "Tomorrow a lot of people are going to be saying: 'Why didn't we sign it?' But then it'll be too late."

Margo, struggling to contain Miaow, snarled: "Oh, get away, you idiot!"

"I'll sign it for you, Doddsy," Doc called cheerfully. "Only, come on over here and quit trying to provoke felino-doggy war."

Ann giggled. "I like Mr. Brecht, Mommy." The red-haired woman in evening clothes smiled down at her faintly.

"That's what I like to hear," Doc called. "Keep on propagandizing your mother."

Paul took Margo's elbow to guide her to his car, but then something made him stop and look up at the Wanderer. The purple-bordered yellow figure had rotated completely into view now and stood out sharply, thick at the base, thinner and sharply bent at the top. It teased Paul's imagination.

AFTER ONE HOUR

Clarence Dodd—or the Little Man, as Paul still called him in his mind—gave Ragnarok's leash to Doc and made another quick simplified sketch, using crisscross lines to show the purple. He labeled it "After One Hour."

One of the cars, a red sedan, backed and took off, far ahead of any of the others.

From ahead the thin woman called: "Please help us, someone. I think Wanda's having a heart attack."

Ragnarok whimpered. Miaow hissed.

Suddenly Paul realized what the yellow figure reminded him of: a dinosaur. A long-jawed dinosaur rearing on its great thick hind legs. His skin prickled. Then he was trembling and there was a faint low roaring in his body.

When Paul was a little boy, he had liked to stand on the middle of the porch swing, a cushioned, solid seat for three hanging from the ceiling by chains at the four corners. It had seemed at the time a daring feat of equilibrium. Now, all at once, he was standing on that swing again, for the ground under his feet moved, gently but solidly with a ponderous muffled thud, a few inches back, a few inches forward, and then back again, and he was swaying his body to keep balanced, just as he'd used to do on the swing.

Over inarticulate exclamations and calls, Hunter shouted with strident anxiety:

"Come away from the cars!"

Margo clung to Paul. Miaow, squeezed between them, squeaked.

People were whirling and running. The brown cliff appeared to swell; cracks opened in it all over; and then it sank, slowly, it looked, but with shuddering sledge strokes at the end. Gravel pattered. A grain stung Paul's cheek. There was a puff of gritty air. Suddenly the smell of raw earth was very strong.

"Come on!" Hunter yelled. "Some of them were caught!"

But Paul first looked upward again at the uprearing yellow figure on the purple orb now perceptibly nearer the moon.

Tyrannosaurus Rex!

Pershino Square is a block of little fountains and neatly manicured greenery roofing a municipal garage and atomic shelter in the heart of old Los Angeles, where the signs read "Su credito es bueno" more often than "Your credit is good."

Tonight the winos and weirdies and anonymous wayfarers who, next to the furred squirrels and feathered pigeons, are the Square's most persistent inhabitants, had something more exciting to observe than the beards of Second Coming preachers and the manic gesticulations of threadbare lecturers.